UAV-Enabled Covert Autonomous Vehicular Communication: Joint Trajectory and Resource Allocation Design

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled communication is recognized as a promising technique in Internet of Vehicles (IoV) to address the issue of ineffective transmission of road condition data and driving instructions caused by obstruction and random fading of ground channels. However, the inherently open channel characteristics in UAV to ground links brings new secure and covert problem in vehicular IoV which largely limit the applications of UAV in IoV. To resolve the issue, this work studies a UAV-enabled covert autonomous vehicular communication network where a UAV is deployed as a relay aided by a jammer to assist the data transmission from the base station to an autonomous vehicle without being detected by a warden whose exact location is unknown. For network performance boosting with transmission covertness consideration, an upload throughput maximization problem is formulated by jointly designing UAV trajectory and resource allocation under a more generally joint covertness constraints. To solve the complicated and highly non-convex problem which contains a large number of variables, we first analyze the detection performance and derives the closed-form expressions of the warden’s minimal detection error probability considering the warden’s location uncertainty. Then, the characterizations on the convexity of minimal detection error probability and the optimal transmission rate are provided, which helps in simplifying original problem and developing an efficient iterative algorithm to solve this problem based on a proposed novel convex approximation method. Simulations are offered to demonstrate the superior convergence, throughput, computation time, and covertness performance of proposed scheme in UAV-enabled vehicular network.